


your hand in mine

by fakelight



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, high fives
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-17
Updated: 2020-05-06
Packaged: 2021-02-08 04:31:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21470107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fakelight/pseuds/fakelight
Summary: He’d grinned at her. Held up his hand.She’d high fived him, and rushed out to her waiting mother.It was only as the car door slammed shut that she processed the question he’d asked her.“Do you want to be my girlfriend?”
Relationships: Jonathan Byers/Nancy Wheeler, Jonathan Byers/Samantha (Stranger Things)
Comments: 20
Kudos: 29
Collections: Jancy Week 2019





	1. how strange, innocence

Nancy Wheeler was twelve years old when she started dating Jonathan Byers.

She thinks.

She isn’t sure. (Not about Jonathan Byers, she’s sure about him; she’d always found him endlessly intriguing, even in elementary school, when he sat at the picnic tables with Barb while Nancy played horses at recess, surrounded by girls who had names like hers—Stacy, Ally. Long e sounds. Names that rhymed.)

What she isn’t sure about is if they ever really started dating.

And if they did, they certainly never stopped.

If it did happen, it is, technically, the longest relationship she’s ever been in. If she’s counting.

She doesn’t know what that says about her.

She was twelve years old, sitting on a bench inside Hawkins Middle, reading _A Tree Grows In Brooklyn _for English, waiting for her mother to pick her up and bring her to ballet. (Nancy never considered it, in her youth, how much of her mother’s life revolved around ferrying her and her siblings across Hawkins, from one activity to another. She must have been so grateful when Mike declared his independence from the automobile and insisted on riding his bike everywhere.)

She’d glanced up to see the Wheeler family station wagon coasting to a stop just outside the front doors, just as Jonathan Byers coasted to a stop in front of her.

“Nancy,” he’d said, breathless.

And that’s when it got complicated.

In the rush of juggling her school bag, her dance bag, and the blare of her mother’s horn, she didn’t quite catch the words that followed her name.

Her eyes had flicked to the car outside, then back to him. She’d thought about asking him to repeat himself, but his face had been open, expectant, nervous. Hopeful.

She couldn’t deny that face.

“Oh, um. Yes,” she’d said, in response to what she’d been pretty sure was a question. 

He’d grinned at her. Held up his hand.

She’d high fived him, and rushed out to her waiting mother.

It was only as the car door slammed shut that she processed the question he’d asked her.

“Do you want to be my girlfriend?”

It’s only later—years later—that Nancy realizes that she’d have said yes even if she had heard him clearly.

As it was, she only got to enjoy their relationship—if it was a relationship (if seventh grade high fives could even be called a relationship)—for one day. Less than a day, even.

She’d glanced over at him shyly all through class, counting the minutes until lunch, when she would confirm if she’d heard him right. He’d returned her glances with equally shy smiles, putting her anxious mind slightly at ease. 

And then the loudspeaker buzzed, Jonathan Byers was called to the office—and he was gone.

His whole family was.

Mike had pouted for weeks, his best friend vanished in an instant. “It’s not _fair_,” he’d moaned at dinner. “Why do they have to move just because of his _stupid dad_.”

The moaning continued over the phone, short long-distance calls that Nancy only ever worked up the nerve to intrude on once, picking up the receiver to mutter a quick “Tell-Jonathan-I-said-hi,” before hanging up with a clatter.

But the frequency of the phone calls trickled away as the school year went on, and by the time summer arrived, Mike had stopped insisting on being allowed to visit Will, and Nancy lost her only chance to confirm her relationship status.

She knows she could have called him herself. But that was, for her twelve year old self, too much to bear. 

And plus, he’d never called her. 

She misheard him, she told herself.

(She didn’t.)

He’d asked her another question, not girlfriend-related at all.

(He hadn’t.)

She’d told all her rhyming friends, giggles down the phone line later that night, and they’d waited alongside her with heavy anticipation for one of them to finally have a boyfriend, only to have their hopes dashed when it ended up being over before it really began. In the end she just felt foolish, for making such a _thing_ over a boy.

“You know, you two never actually broke up,” Barb pointed out one day, once Nancy was able to think about it without wanting to bury her face in her hands, a matter of years later. As time goes on, it became almost a joke to her friends, a Schrödinger’s relationship that Nancy is both in and not in at the same time. 

“Oh you can’t,” they said to James C, who asked her to prom as Nancy sat, blushing furiously, at her lunch table freshman year. “She’s dating Jonathan Byers.” (He’d been a senior, convinced she couldn’t turn him down, staggering away at Nancy’s faux-regretful confirmation of her relationship status.)

“So what’s this about you and some long distance guy?” Steve had asked, the first night she’d allowed herself to be inveigled into his back seat. 

“Oh,” Nancy had said, already pulling her shirt over her head. “That’s . . . nothing. Middle school stuff.”

“Good,” Steve said, and Nancy forgot all about Jonathan Byers for the moment. 

But she never truly forgets, not really.

Nancy moves to the city in one fell swoop. 

She loads the U-Haul herself, only takes three wrong turns, and crams her entire life into the tiny studio that somehow costs _more_ than the two-bedroom apartment she’d left Steve standing in, bereft.

She locates the nearest bodega, maps out her work commute on the subway, and prepares to begin her life anew.

It doesn’t _quite_ work out like she plans.

She does manage to navigate the subway with relative ease, and she stops by the bodega almost every day, grabbing yet another item she’s realized she doesn’t own and cannot seem to live without.

The _life anew_ part, however, eludes her.

She has a life, of course—drinks with college friends, lunches out with work colleagues. She tries new things, meets new people, goes on an endless parade of first dates. She even makes it to second and third dates for a few. But in the end, her days start to end up feeling enough like the inevitability she’d tried to escape that she wonders if it might make sense to head back to Indiana, see if Steve is still standing right where she left him. 

It’s then that her thoughts turn to Jonathan.

Not in any kind of concrete sort of way—when she thinks of him it always feels hazy, somehow—but more idealistic; she imagines him living the life she wishes she could lead. He’d escaped Hawkins, in a way she somehow cannot, like the town is clinging to her, holding onto her fast even across state lines.

As a coping mechanism, it’s _pretty_ _fucked up_, as Steve used to say, having the ghosts of her past haunt her present, but she’s working on it. She took the first step, at least. 

She left. 

“I wish you’d just come back,” her mother pleads, on the nights Nancy finds herself longing for the comforts of home, fingers grasped tight around the phone. What her mother doesn’t know is that she doesn’t call to be convinced to return.

She calls because it’s the one thing that strengthens her resolve to stay.

She only knows one person at the party.

Alice waves to her from across the apartment as Nancy navigates through the crowd, holding a six-pack in front of her like a peace offering, losing four along the way as she edges through and around clumps of people.

Nancy offers up the spare, taking the last beer for herself, and proceeds to endure the interminable agony that is entering a story halfway through and not knowing the teller well enough for them to recount the beginning. She likes Alice, she does, finding her Midwest sensibilities comfortingly refreshing after her months in the city, but theirs is a friendship of convenience, nothing deeper. Nancy wonders what Barb would say, if she were here. 

_Stop thinking about your dead friend and make some new ones_, probably.

Nancy laughs to herself at the thought, and then starts at the unfortunate realization that someone is saying her name, and has been, for some time now.

“Sorry.” Her eyebrows raise, her eyes open wide, trying to make it seem like she was mostly listening this whole time. “I didn’t catch that.”

Alice gives her a look, but she’s smiling. “Sam was asking if you know the host.” 

Sam ends up being a girl with black hair and even blacker eyeliner, who seems to be nursing Nancy’s other beer. 

She shakes her head, shrugging slightly. “Just Alice—”

“The only person that matters,” Alice interjects.

Nancy rolls her eyes a little. “I just moved here from Indiana,” she continues. “Alice is taking pity on me because I know _no one_ in the city.” 

Sam makes an _ah yes_ face of benign interest, but then her eyebrows crinkle together. “Actually, my boyfriend grew up in Indiana, I think.” She turns her head, calls into the kitchen, but the actual name gets lost in the buzz of the crowd. 

Sean, maybe.

Sam goes off in search of Sean (or was it John?) and Nancy takes a swig of beer as the conversation turns to the subway, as it is wont to do among people with only tenuous connections to each other but all with a singular hatred for their shared means of transportation.

Nancy’s just happy she has her own story—getting caught underground for half an hour, the windows steaming up as people shed clothes around her—and manages to coast on that contribution for the next twenty minutes, sipping the dregs of her bottle as the group grows and shrinks, and the stories go on and on.

She’s about to go in search of another drink (or if she’s being honest, maybe an Irish goodbye) when Alice begins recounting the story of her last date, a story Nancy knows from lunch last week, and realizes that she has one more story to contribute.

“—and when I told him I had to be up early the next morning, he rolls over, gives me a _high five_, says _nothing else_ and strolls out the door. Haven’t seen him since.”

“I’ve got that beat,” says Nancy, and knocks back the rest of her beer. She takes a deep breath. “So I’m in seventh grade, and I’m waiting for my mom to pick me up after school. When—”

And then she sees him.

Coasting up to her just like he had eleven years ago.

“Oh my god,” she breathes.

She sees his hand reaching toward her, and for one absurd, heart-stopping moment, Nancy thinks he’s going to give her a high five. But the hand keeps going up, pulling her into a hug, and she actually cannot believe this is happening.

“Nancy Wheeler,” Jonathan Byers says, and she can feel her name vibrating through her, he’s holding her so tight. She wonders if that’s why she can’t catch her breath, but even after he releases her, she’s still got that feeling—like she’s missed a step, like the universe has been thrown out of alignment.

“Oh my god,” she says again, because that’s all she can do.

“I’m guessing you two know each other,” Alice remarks dryly.

He’s grinning, and his hair is shorter than it used to be (of course it would be, he’s not in seventh grade anymore), but he’s unmistakably Jonathan Byers, eleven years older. He spins to the side, wrapping his arm around Nancy, and she wonders if she’s dreaming, because this _cannot_ actually be happening.

“Um, yeah,” she begins, but Jonathan cuts her off.

“Oh, we go way back,” he declares, and smiles fondly down at her. “Nancy’s my girlfriend.”

Nancy chokes on nothing, and changes her mind. She isn’t dreaming.

She has actually died. 

It’s the only explanation. One last gasp of reality, chiding her for spending so much time thinking about a boy that she was never supposed to see again.

Death is cruel, though, because instead of the sweet bliss of nothingness, instead she has Jonathan Byers grinning at her, Alice looking at her, dumbstruck, and from behind her, a vaguely familiar voice saying, “I thought _I_ was your girlfriend.”

Nancy turns to find Sam staring at her, a look of amused concern on her face.

“Um,” Nancy says.


	2. so long, lonesome

Sam bursts into laughter.

“I’m just kidding. You should see your face,” she tells Nancy, who can already feel the heat radiating off her cheeks. She wants to press her bottle to them to cool herself down, but her beer is warm, not to mention she wants to cling to the last scrap of dignity she has left. “He got so excited when I told him a girl named Nancy from Indiana was here, he told me the whole story. I’m just glad you actually know him—it would have been awful if you were some stranger and I’d gotten his hopes up for nothing.”

“Oh,” Nancy says weakly. “Right.”

Jonathan slides over, letting Sam into their little clump on his other side. His arm drops from around her shoulder in the process, and for some strange reason, Nancy feels an inexplicable sense of loss. 

She shakes her head, shaking off the feeling.

“I wasn’t sure you’d remember me,” he tells her, and it’s in that moment Nancy sees the old Jonathan Byers, the one who’d sat at the picnic tables alone, flickering through this newer version that stands before her. 

She gives him an inscrutable look. 

_I think about you all the time_, she wants to say. _I don’t know why. _Her mouth twists, keeping the words in.

Jonathan frowns slightly. “No of course,” he says, with a rueful laugh. “Of course you wouldn’t remember me, I—”

Nancy realizes too late where his mind has gone and takes a step closer, stopping him with a carefully placed hand on his forearm, gripping it perhaps a little too tight.

“Jonathan,” she says, her voice serious. Far too serious for a boy eleven years removed. She takes a quick, calming breath, presses her lips together. Tries again. “I could never forget about you.” Lighter this time, but she can hear the undercurrent of something more than sentiment.

He smiles at that, still the boy from the past.

Someone coughs, and Nancy realizes how this must look—a stranger to most, pouring out an earnest reassurance of remembrance—and blinks quickly, throwing her head back in a laugh that she hopes no one can tell is fake.

“You were like this mythical creature,” she says, hating her words even as she hopes they work, “the boy who disappeared. Even in high school, no one could figure out what happened to you.”

A slight crease appears in between his eyebrows, but she can hear the laughter—light, knowing—and she knows that she’s succeeded, that she won’t be that weird girl everyone talks about after she leaves the party.

Still.

There’s a crease.

“I thought—” he begins, and Nancy feels a kind of swoop in her stomach, but the rest of his words are lost in a loud cheer that comes from across the room. Someone’s won at beer pong, apparently.

Jonathan’s head swivels to see what’s going on, the confusion dropping from his face, and Nancy takes the momentary reprieve from the intensity of the situation to take a step back and compose herself, trying to take a swig of beer, and failing. At first she thinks it’s because she’s so overwhelmed she’s forgotten how to drink, but after a second failed attempt, she realizes her bottle is empty. 

And that Jonathan is watching her again, a bemused smile on his face. The crease is gone, replaced by two eyebrows, raised high.

“I’m just gonna,” Nancy says, gesturing toward the kitchen with her empty bottle, and doesn’t wait for a response to make her escape.

Nancy yanks open the fridge, and under the guise of selecting her next drink, bends down, pressing her face against the inside of the door, letting the coolness soothe her flushed cheeks. She breathes in, and back out.

Now that she’s alone, she lets herself process the absurdity of the situation she finds herself in—him, here, actually standing in front of her.

She thinks about pinching herself, knowing that anywhere with this much potential for her own embarrassment has a greater probability than not of being a dream—featuring Jonathan Byers, even—but the slow buzz of the alcohol and the feeling of the fridge and the poke she receives to the ribs as Alice sidles up behind her leave her convinced that she is, undeniably, awake.

Nancy lifts her eyes over the edge of the door. “Don’t.”

Alice blinks, all fake innocence. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Nancy throws her a look.

She throws one back, then shrugs. “Your boy’s leaving,” she says, with a sniff. Her eyes flick up, knowing. “Thought you might want to know.”

Nancy jerks up, her head craning around to find him before she realizes what she’s doing. He can’t be leaving, not already. He’d been missing for eleven years and now he’s disappearing again?

Alice takes a sip of beer with a shit-eating grin. “He’s looking for you. Wants to _say goodbye_.”

“He’s not my boy,” Nancy bites out, distracted, even as she searches the crowd for the one familiar face.

“Mmm hmm.”

“Shut up.” 

It’s then that Nancy catches a glimpse, between two clumps of people—Jonathan, headed straight for her. She wonders, perhaps irrationally, if he can tell she’s still blushing.

He stops a few feet away, blocked by another clump of bodies, and calls over the music, “We have to go!” 

At least that’s what she thinks he says.

“Oh, okay!” Nancy nods brightly, and she hopes, nonchalantly. “Well it was good to see you!” She knows it’s too much, too fake, that her feelings are probably on display for all to see—and she doesn’t even know what it is she’s feeling. Disappointment? Loss? Something else that she’ll have to unpack when she isn’t trying to convince everyone around her, herself included, that she’s a regular girl, saying goodbye to a regular boy, that she knew a regular amount of years ago?

The bodies in front of her shift, suddenly, and he’s standing in front of her.

“We have to go,” he repeats, quieter now. “But I didn’t want to leave without—”

“Right, yeah, no, I know,” Nancy babbles, before falling suddenly silent. What else can she say? He’s leaving. Maybe she’ll never see him again. She certainly never thought she would before tonight. Maybe this is it.

He’s looking at her strangely, and she wonders if her blush is even worse than she thought. But it’s not disgust, or confusion. It’s almost fond, the way his eyes track over her face. But then again, she’s been doing the same all night. Reconciling the boy she knew with the man in front of her. How he grew.

“We should catch up,” he says quickly, glancing over his shoulder. “More than this. I’ll um, I’ll call you. Drinks. Or coffee, or something.”

She nods once, brightly, eagerly. “Yes.”

He looks once more over his shoulder, all in a rush, then turns back, and time seems to slow. “Nancy Wheeler,” he says again, simply, and then steps forward, enveloping her in a hug once more.

“Jonathan Byers,” she says back, holds on tight—and then he’s gone.

For the next three weeks, Nancy purposefully doesn’t think about Jonathan. 

Unfortunately, she still dreams about him almost every night. Mundane things. Ordering beers in the hazy heat of summer, walking through an empty parking lot as snow coats the ground. Rearranging furniture.

But she doesn’t _think_ about him.

She doesn’t think about their mutual friends, about how he hasn’t called her, even though he said he would. About how he has a girlfriend, and about how the version of him she’d constructed in her head matches up to the real one, and how he could have gotten her number if he’d _really_ wanted to. She thinks even less about how she could have gotten his.

She stops looking for him on every street corner, hoping for a chance encounter. Even Alice forgets to ask about him during their weekly lunch.

So when a sudden rainstorm in the middle of a Thursday afternoon sends her fleeing, umbrella-less, into the closest building for shelter, wringing out her hair and breathing hard, she doesn’t even notice him standing behind the dingy bar until she hears her name.

“Nancy?”

She freezes, looking up from under a curtain of hair.

Jonathan is staring at her.

“Oh my god,” she says. Again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Genuine, real apologies for how long this took, and for how short this is. The long and the short of it. There is more, already written after this, but it feels deserving of its own chapter. Plus, I wanted to provide something in these troubled times, as the commercials like to say. Special thanks to the commenter who asked 'yo where’s the next chapter at', this is for you. (Truly.)


End file.
